Fireflies
by garbagecat
Summary: Some memories don't ever resurface, and they stay buried within the recesses of his mind. "...and some things were just better off left that way." And then there are some that just keep haunting him even in sleep. Hazel ficlet


**A/N**:  
I'm filled with this odd overwhelming sadness towards Hazel now.  
It must be the latest translated Zerosum chapters in the Saiyuki Manga community.

"Fireflies pose a significance in Japanese folklore. The lights of a firefly symbolize human souls, called "hitodama," which are fabled in Japanese lore as being flickering orbs of fire." When I was researching 'fireflies' for one of the November word prompts, I came across the term 'hitodama', which description immediately made me think of Hazel and his soul-gathering ability. The slight connection gave birth to a weird ficlet.

* * *

"Hazel," Gato said, and everything started again.

The world spiraled and flew and closed in and spread out, all around them, all around him. Everywhere, grass, concrete, wood, there was blood, and there was his master, lain bare in front of him, both of them in the church and the corpse riddled with scratches and tears and rips like a cushion, but there were no feathers or fluff, and instead guts and intestines and blood spilled out and stayed in sight.

And there Gato was, a rip in his bloodstained shirt but no cut on his skin to corroborate, kneeling on the ground beside him, staring – _staring_ at him and awaiting his words and commands, and his lips were pressed in an unquestioning line. Lights that shimmered danced around in the air all around them, fireflies living and burning with life as they drew lines in the air with their lights. Those lines would stay burned in his eyelids if he closed his eyes, but his eyes were wide open.

"Hazel," he repeated, and by then, everything bled away and the only thing in his sight was Gato, Gato of the present, those golden eyes gleaming in the darkness and his figure blending with the world around him.

"Hazel."

"…Ungh," he only managed, but he'd wanted to say something better, something refined and perfect and indifferent, but all he'd managed was a pitiful sound that was hardly better than what an animal would achieve. 'Gato,' he wanted to say, and he wanted to keep repeating that name over and over and over again until his voice turned hoarse and all the blood that should've stayed with him from his nightmare gurgled out of his throat, but he merely closed his eyes and reached his hand out, thumbing the lines of the face hovering somewhere above him, running his fingers along them because they were familiar, and he needed familiar.

He could still see the lights from the fireflies on the back of his eyelids, but those lights weren't fireflies, and the darkness he saw wasn't the back of his eyelids. They were ethereal balls of glowing light and the darkness was an abyss, another dimension, another mind. When he tried to grasp that entity, it danced out of reach and then it was gone.

He opened his eyes again, watching the face above him and searching the eyes of Gato for something. He saw a void, and he saw a whirl of dancing emotions that didn't acknowledge themselves, and they were all unlabelled, just like they always were, just like how Gato always was unreadable. He didn't know if this emotion was worry, or that emotion was sorrow, and when he reached the deepest part of the void, the emotion that was masked emitted a sense of longing so muted that he eventually gave it up as indifference. When he came to in reality again, he realized that he wasn't seeing anything, and he couldn't feel anything, but reality wasn't reality, because somewhere in the midst of all the emotions fleeting and flickering all about him like the fireflies in his dreams, he'd fallen into a Gato-coloured dream where he didn't know if he was awake, or sleeping.

_Slipping into a pit, where the ground was nonexistent, their individual lives had somehow become tangled so tightly that it was impossible to tell which line belonged to whom. And they fell, falling, and it was only endless because the end was at the end of the end._

Such was the routine of their summer, winter, seasonal nights, where one thing melded into another and time crawled by, ticking away slowly, and everything was changing so fast that nobody noticed it changing.

_And the world goes crazy around you, and you can't keep your eyes off them._

Somewhere between chasing the silhouette of Sanzo and dreaming of bloodied days long past, the signs of his fate had crept up on him and stayed around him like a cloud of death, but he didn't see it, and maybe Gato did, but he chose to remain in silence, to hold Hazel and protect him until the very end.

Hazel would've remembered a night with a full moon so long ago where he'd stood, hand in hand with Filbert Grouse, staring up at the stars where he'd defined a native american face in those stars that had seemed, at that time, so familiar to him for inexplicable reasons, and standing in the field behind the church, fireflies glowing all around them and blinking out of existence, unnoticed to them both because _one had already accepted the way things would be and one was pondering too heavily on that face to care_, but he didn't remember that he'd ever had such a memory, and some things were just better off left that way.


End file.
